Category Archives: Representation

We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian

Nick Russo has worked his way from a rough Brooklyn neighbourhood to a reporting job at one of the city’s biggest newspapers. But the late 1950s are a hostile time for gay men, and Nick knows that he can’t let anyone into his life. He just never counted on meeting someone as impossible to say no to as Andy. Andy Fleming’s newspaper-tycoon father wants him to take over the family business. Andy, though, has no intention of running the paper. He’s barely able to run his life–he’s never paid a bill on time, routinely gets lost on the way to work, and would rather gouge out his own eyes than deal with office politics. Andy… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Period-typical homophobia & threats of outing
  • Infidelity recounted (protagonist’s ex-fiancée)
  • Parental divorce recounted
  • Physical sibling abuse recounted
  • Alcohol consumption & mentions of smoking and drug use
  • Death of a mother in a bombing recounted
  • Police violence & corruption
  • Blackmail
  • Bullying (recounted & off-page)

Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan

When her whole life collapsed, Rae still had books. Dying, she seizes a second chance at living: a magical bargain that lets her enter the world of her favourite fantasy series. She wakes in a castle on the edge of a hellish chasm, in a kingdom on the brink of war. Home to dangerous monsters, scheming courtiers and her favourite fictional character: the Once and Forever Emperor. He’s impossibly alluring, as only fiction can be. And in this fantasy world, she discovers she’s not the heroine, but the villainess in the Emperor’s tale. So bet it. The wicked are better dressed, with… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Parental abandonment
  • Cancer (protagonist)
  • Murder, torture & flogging

Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White

On the night Miles Abernathy—sixteen-year-old socialist and proud West Virginian—comes out as trans to his parents, he sneaks off to a party, carrying evidence that may finally turn the tide of the blood feud plaguing Twist Creek: Photos that prove the county’s Sheriff Davies was responsible for the so-called “accident” that injured his dad, killed others, and crushed their grassroots efforts to unseat him. The feud began a hundred years ago when Miles’s great-great-grandfather, Saint Abernathy, incited a miners’ rebellion that ended with a public execution at the… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Ableism discussed & mentions of disfiguremisia
  • Transphobia, misgendering & deadnaming
  • Emotional & physical intimate partner violence
  • Sexual assault mentioned
  • Drug dependency discussed (protagonist)*
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Murder
  • Animal death (dog, deer, off-page)

Context : The protagonist uses opioids after surgery and undergoes withdrawal after quitting without medical supervision

The Shadow Cabinet by Juno Dawson

Niamh Kelly is dead. Her troubled twin, Ciara, now masquerades as the benevolent witch as Her Majesty’s Royal Coven prepares to crown her High Preistess. Suffering from amnesia, Ciara can’t remember what she’s done–but if she wants to survive, she must fool Niamh’s adopted family and friends; the coven; and the murky Shadow Cabinet–a secret group of mundane civil servants who are already suspicious of witches. While she tries to rebuild her past, she realizes none of her past has forgotten her, including her former lover, renegade warlock Dabney Hale. On the… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Period-typical misogyny & ableism
  • Infidelity
  • Amnesia & memory loss
  • Loss of autonomy (demonic possession)
  • Animal death

Her Majesty’s Royal Coven by Juno Dawson

At the dawn of their adolescence, on the eve of the summer solstice, four young girls–Helena, Leonie, Niamh and Elle–took the oath to join Her Majesty’s Royal Coven, established by Queen Elizabeth I as a covert government department. Now, decades later, the witch community is still reeling from a civil war and Helena is now the reigning High Priestess of the organization. Yet Helena is the only one of her friend group still enmeshed in the stale bureaucracy of HMRC. Elle is trying to pretend she’s a normal housewife, and Niamh has become a country vet, using her powers to heal sick animals. In what Helena… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Transphobia, deadnaming & misgendering including outing
  • Infidelity
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Kidnapping & captivity
  • Animal death

Queen B: The Story of Anne Boleyn, Witch Queen by Juno Dawson

It’s 1536 and the Queen has been beheaded. Lady Grace Fairfax, witch, knows that something foul is at play – that someone had betrayed Anne Boleyn and her coven. Wild with the loss of their leader – and her lover, a secret that if spilled could spell Grace’s own end – she will do anything in her power to track down the traitor. But there’s more at stake than revenge: it was one of their own, a witch, that betrayed them, and Grace isn’t the only one looking for her. King Henry VIII has sent witchfinders after them, and they’re organized like they’ve never been before under his new advisor, the impassioned Sir Ambrose Fulke, a cold… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Period-typical misogyny & homophobia
  • Decapitation
  • Poisoning

The Phoenix Keeper by S.A. MacLean

As head phoenix keeper at a world-renowned zoo for magical creatures, Aila’s childhood dream of conserving critically endangered firebirds seems closer than ever. There’s just one glaring caveat: her zoo’s breeding program hasn’t functioned for a decade. When a tragic phoenix heist sabotages the flagship initiative at a neighboring zoo, Aila must prove her derelict facilities are fit to take the reins. But saving an entire species from extinction requires more than stellar animal handling skills. Carnivorous water horses, tempestuous thunderhawks, mischievous dragons. Aila has no problem wrangling beasts. But muster… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Anxiety (protagonist)

A Dark and Drowning Tide by Allison Saft

Lorelei Kaskel, a folklorist with a quick temper and an even quicker wit, is on an expedition with six eccentric nobles in search of a fabled spring. The magical spring promises untold power, which the king wants to harness to secure his reign of the embattled country of Brunnestaad. Lorelei is determined to use this opportunity to prove herself and make her wildest, most impossible dream come to become a naturalist, able to travel freely to lands she’s only ever read about. The expedition gets off to a harrowing start when its leader—Lorelei’s beloved mentor—is murdered in her quarters aboard their ship. The suspects are her… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Antisemitism discussed
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Drugging
  • Blood, gore & injury depiction including dead body and emesis
  • Strangulation
  • Drowning
  • Fire

Lover Birds by Leanne Egan

When Isabel Williams moves to Liverpool, she criticises seemingly everything in Eloise Byrne’s life – her city, her accent, her trademark boldness – so if, when she catches Isabel staring, Eloise feels her pulse race, it must be because they hate each other. It surely couldn’t be for any other reason, could it? Eloise needs to get her ADHD under control in time for A-Levels, but when she meets Isabel, school becomes the least of her concerns. What begins as outright contempt turns into an oddly satisfactory rivalry, but for their rivalry to shift further into romance, their relationship must withstand Isabel’s classism, Eloise’s distrust, and whatever secrets their friends are hiding from them..

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Sexual harassment
  • Lesbophobia & slurs
  • Coming out themes
  • Alcohol consumption

You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian

The 1960 baseball season is shaping up to be the worst year of Eddie O’Leary’s life. He can’t manage to hit the ball, his new teammates hate him, he’s living out of a suitcase, and he’s homesick. When the team’s owner orders him to give a bunch of interviews to some snobby reporter, he’s ready to call it quits. He can barely manage to behave himself for the length of a game, let alone an entire season. But he’s already on thin ice, so he has no choice but to agree. Mark Bailey is not sports reporter. He writes for the arts page, and these days he’s barely even managing to… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Period-typical homophobia, racism & antisemitism including mentions of the gay protagonist being disowned and kicked out of home as a teenager
  • Infidelity mentioned (secondary characters)
  • Alcohol consumption & mentions of smoking, tobacco and drug use
  • Hospitalisation (secondary character)
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of an abusive parent with alcoholism in a drunk-driving accident recounted
  • Death of a partner from a heart attack discussed
  • Death of a grandparent from a heart attack recounted